He recorded that the Royal Family had driven a hard bargain but joked in public that he was “glad it was going to a good family”.

They bought back Spencers, the old Courtauld family home in Essex where Mollie had previously lived with Augustine Courtauld.

She was the daughter of Samuel Courtauld and heiress to part of the Courtauld textile fortune.

His father-in-law awarded him a private income of £5,000 a year after tax for life, the equivalent of a Cabinet Minister's salary, and equivalent to almost £260,000 at 2014 prices.

As a child of Empire, from his mid-teens onwards, Butler was expected to look after his younger siblings, arranging for them to stay with relatives during school holidays and sending them Christmas presents that he pretended had been sent by their parents.

At that time, Secretary was the only office normally contested, putting him on track to be Vice-President for Lent 1924 and President for Easter (summer term) 1924.He failed to win a scholarship to Eton, and so he attended Marlborough College.He left Marlborough at the end of 1920, a week after his 18th birthday, and spent five months in France with a Protestant pastor in Abbeville.Butler was born in Attock Serai, Attock, India, to Sir Montagu Sherard Dawes Butler of the Indian Civil Service and his wife, Anne Gertrude (née Smith).Butler's mother was the daughter of George Smith (1833-1919 who was Principal of the Doveton Boys College in Calcutta.